parenting and the safest sex of all
by Dale McGowan
We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.
Lily Tomlin
Joycelyn Elders, the most quotable U.S. Surgeon General of all time, once said, “Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily.”
That kind of quotability can get a political appointee fired. At a UN conference on AIDS in 1994, Elders was asked whether it would be appropriate to promote masturbation to prevent young people from engaging in riskier forms of sexual activity. “I think that it is part of human sexuality,” she replied, “and perhaps it should be taught.”
Never mind that the answer was sensible. Never mind that it was true. Once U.S. conservatives pictured their progeny receiving instruction in self-gratification—complete with cucumber-based demos, no doubt—Elders’ dismissal was assured.
Sense and truth have never had much place in our cultural discourse on sex, and few aspects of the topic have been more twitchingly mismanaged than masturbation. Those who recall the baffling mix of intense pleasure and intense shame that accompanies most discoveries of masturbation should want nothing more than to spare our own kids the unnecessary torment. Yet masturbation, the very first form of sex kids will generally encounter, is the topic most often missing from parent-child discussions of sex.
The roots of our dysfunctional attitudes toward masturbation are intertwined with the age-old distrust of bodily pleasures. That distrust probably didn’t originate in religion. Among other things, religion is simply a place to put our most beloved bad ideas for safekeeping. But when it comes to perpetuating and reinforcing dysfunctional attitudes toward the safest sex of all, it’s hard to beat the Abrahamic religions for over-the-top hysteria.
The Catholic catechism calls masturbation “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” One popular 19th century Jewish theologian called it “a graver sin than any other in the Torah.” Mormonism teaches that “masturbation is a sinful habit that robs one of the Spirit,” while Shi’a Islam forbids it completely, quoting sect founder Imam Ali as saying “one who masturbates commits a sin equal to killing me eighty times.” ¡Ay caramba!
But at least one influential religious conservative has voiced support for a more accepting, naturalistic parenting approach to masturbation—and has been excoriated for it by his fellows. The following passage refers to a conversation he had as a boy with his minister father:
We were riding in the car, and my dad said, “Jim, when I was a boy, I worried so much about masturbation. It really became a scary thing for me because I thought God was condemning me for what I couldn’t help. So I’m telling you now that I hope you don’t feel the need to engage in this act when you reach the teen years, but if you do, you shouldn’t be too concerned about it. I don’t believe it has much to do with your relationship with God.” What a compassionate thing my father did for me that night in the car.
Aside from “I hope you don’t feel the need” and the bit about God, this is almost precisely the message I want to get across to my own kids. And it comes from none other than James Dobson.
He still tangles it with silliness, suggesting that boys in the act think not of any girls they know but only of their “eventual wives.” Christian author Herbert J. Miles goes one better, suggesting that boys pray first, thanking God for the gift of sexuality, then think only of him during orgasm (which certainly gives “Oh, God!” a whole new meaning). But let’s give credit to both of them for getting the basic message right and thereby reducing the number of children growing up with unnecessary self-loathing and sexual repression.
In the absence of communication on the issue, children are guaranteed to feel tremendous shame and guilt when the natural developments of early adolescence lead them to self-stimulation. When your child is on the cusp of puberty, casually let him or her know:
- What masturbation is;
- That it’s a normal thing nearly everyone does at some point;
- That it’s a natural indication that the body is becoming ready for sexual activity and reproduction;
- That all of the stories about grave consequences are complete nonsense;
- That though it is not shameful, it should be done only in private.
Removing the guilt and shame from our children’s first encounters with their sexuality requires no detailed description or instruction—just simple permission. And nonreligious parents, free of repressive doctrines, are in an ideal position to give their children that permission, as well as the mental, emotional, and sexual health that comes with it.
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This column also appears in the June 4 issue of Humanist Network News.
A nice page of info on masturbation from Cool Nurse — Teen Health, Teen Advice.
sex and the balls of the evangelical
Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on Earth, and you should save it for someone you love. –Butch Hancock, country singer/songwriter
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COLORADO SPRINGS — After dessert, the 63 men stood and read aloud a covenant “before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.”
The gesture signaled that the fathers would guard their daughters from what evangelicals consider a profoundly corrosive “hook-up culture.” The evening, which alternated between homemade Christian rituals and giddy dancing, was a joyous public affirmation of the girls’ sexual abstinence until they wed. (from “Dancing the Night Away, With a Higher Purpose,” New York Times, May 19, 2008.)
The photo is of a “Purity Ball” in Colorado Springs, where evangelical dads pledge to protect the “purity” of their daughters until marriage. It’s one of a growing number of such balls from coast to coast. “It’s a huge effort,” said one evangelical father. “A single ball won’t do it. Spreading the message that abstinence works takes a lot of balls.”1
Let’s begin by recognizing my common ground with these evangelical fathers. I too want to keep my daughters from becoming pregnant (and my son from getting someone pregnant) before certain events run their course. “Certain events” for me include education and time getting to know one’s adult self; for evangelicals, it’s marriage. So let’s just say we’re both happier with the idea of a daughter who is pregnant at 25 than at 15. I’ll call that common ground. But then the ground opens up. The Times article continues:
“Fathers, our daughters are waiting for us,” [event host] Mr. Wilson, 49, told the men. “They are desperately waiting for us in a culture that lures them into the murky waters of exploitation. They need to be rescued by you, their dad.”
(“Rapunzel, Rapunzel…”)
“The culture says you’re free to sleep with as many people as you want to,” said Khrystian Wilson, 20, one of the Wilsons’ seven children, including five girls. “What does that get you but complete chaos?”
This is another constant refrain: you have a choice between being Raped by The Culture (one monolithic thing) or being Rescued by the Men of God. Either way, there’s a man on top.
I for one never got the memo that I could sleep with as many people as I wanted to. That’s a bad idea for reasons that go beyond “purity.” The invitation to promiscuity is out there, but so are other voices. How about teaching kids to discern between good messages and bad, even when Dad is not in the room?
For the Wilsons and the growing number of people who have come to their balls, premarital sex is seen as inevitably destructive, especially to girls, who they say suffer more because they are more emotional than boys.
There was a time when I’d revel in the double entendres of that sentence, but I’m far too mature now. Instead, let me point out the continuing message that girls are weak and in need of male rescue.
Recent studies have suggested that close relationships between fathers and daughters can reduce the risk of early sexual activity among girls and teenage pregnancy…Abstinence is never mentioned at the Colorado Springs Purity Ball, but a litany of fathers’ duties is — mainly, making time to get involved in their daughters’ lives and setting an example.
Excellent! Again we overlap as evangelicals find their desires in sync with the research. But as the name “Purity Ball,” the white dresses and the constant pledging make clear, S-E-X in general and abstinence in particular are the unmentioned elephants humping in the corner. As is so often the case in the evangelical movement, any research that is inconvenient to their preferred narrative is simply ignored. The abstinence-only approach, like so many of our well-intentioned crusades, makes things worse:
But studies have also shown that most teenagers who say they will remain abstinent, like those at the ball, end up having sex before marriage, and they are far less likely to use condoms than their peers.
An inconvenient truth.
In a ballroom after dinner, bare but for a seven-foot wooden cross at one end, the fathers and daughters gathered along the walls. Kevin Moore, there with his three girls, told the men they were taking a stand for their families and their nation. Then he and Mr. Wilson walked to the cross with two large swords, which they held up before it to make an arch.
Is it chilling in here, or is it just me? Read that bolded passage again — an amazing condensation of religion, militarism, nationalism, authority, and patriarchy. That’s our favorite soporific, a seductive brew that bubbles up over and over in human history, right before everything goes to flaming hell.
Each father and his daughter walked under the arch and knelt before the cross. Synthesized hymns played. The fathers sometimes held their daughters and whispered a short prayer, and then the girls each placed a white rose, representing purity, at the foot of the cross.
The girls, many wearing purity rings, made silent vows. “I promise to God and myself and my family that I will stay pure in my thoughts and actions until I marry,” said Katie Swindler, 16. Every half-hour, Mr. Wilson stopped the dancing so that fathers could bless their daughters before everyone.
Yeesh. Yeesh.
One of things that most deeply saddens me about all this is the way it demonizes sex. Yes, it’s a powerful thing. It can turn your world upside down in several ways, not all of them good. But I want my kids to know that it’s also beautiful and amazing and fun and good. It’s the reason we’re here, after all. In evolutionary terms, it’s the best thing there is, which is why it’s fun.
Connor and I have talked about the fact that our bodies “want” to have sex for evolutionary reasons as well as emotional ones. Imagine two populations, I said. One is wired up to enjoy sex; the other is indifferent to it. Which one is going to pass its genes along, and which will die out? He got it immediately, even declared it “so cool.” And when his body starts insisting that sex is a good idea, he won’t be blindsided by the feeling (unlike some kids in Schenectady). He’ll understand it, which gives him a better chance of staying in control of it. If instead kids learn that these feelings are evil and inspired by Satan, they’ll spend their adolescence convulsed with guilt and retain a deeply dysfunctional view of their bodies and of themselves.
Equating abstinence with “purity” sends the instant message that sex is not a great good but something that renders us impure. Evangelicals counter that it suddenly goes from purely impure to wholly holy after marriage — but by then you’ve rather insulted and debased it, haven’t you? Just imagine the confusion in these kids’ heads when that coin suddenly flips.
[Thanks to Hemant Mehta, I think, for bringing Purity Balls to my attention.]
________________
1Unfortunately I made this one up.
Visit the new BY THE NUMBERS page for some interesting sex ed stats.
View the documentary Abstinence Comes to Albuquerque on Google Video (2006, 27 min.) The compelling story of a faith-based organization using federal funds to bring abstinence-only sex education into public schools in Albuquerque.
ECCLESIASTES and SONG OF SONGS (bookin’ through the bible 9) – guest column by Timothy Mills
The Wise King’s Fans
Guest column by Timothy Mills at Friendly Humanist
I have the good fortune to cover two of the most humanist books of the Bible: Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, both traditionally attributed to wise King Solomon. Ecclesiastes is a philosophical reflection communicating an old man’s existential angst; Song of Songs is an erotic exchange between two lovers.
My wife, Deena, put it this way: “Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes before he went on Prozac and Song of Songs after he went on Viagra.”
Let’s look a little deeper.
Ecclesiastes
Identifying King Solomon as the author of Ecclesiastes “is no more than a conventional literary device; the author commends his thoughts to the public under the name of the greatest sage in Israel.”1 I’ll follow David Plotz and the folks at Humanistic Texts in simply calling the author Koheleth (“teacher, leader of the assembly”), the original Hebrew word
which translates to Greek as
Hence “Ecclesiastes”.
The main theme of the book is Koheleth saying of many things “This is vanity”2, and his repeated declarations that “All is vanity”3. That’s 12 near-identical phrases, plus the odd use of the word “vanity” elsewhere in Ecclesiastes. The slightly punchier NIV translation uses the word “meaningless” here. The New King James version offers “Absurdity, Frustration, Futility, Nonsense” as further alternatives in a footnote. When we look at the original Hebrew, we find that “The roots of the word hebel
indicate vapor, fog, steam, breeze or breath…. they all describe something that is transitory, ephemeral, impermanent.”
Aha! “Vanity”, “meaningless”, and the others are editorial extrapolations by early translators. Now we see the original sense more clearly: Everything is ephemeral; Everything is transitory. This is a difficult fact of life faced by humanists and others who do not believe in an eternal afterlife.
No discussion of Ecclesiastes would be complete without mentioning the first eight verses of chapter 3. You’ve probably already heard them – here’s the start:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
And so on. Some of the lines are questionable (“a time to kill”, “a time to hate”, “a time for war”), but the overall sentiment is reassuring – even to a humanist. Farmers must accept the seasons as they come; living creatures must accept the cycles of life. Naturally, these lines are popular for funeral readings.
The lines that follow, however, say that God ordains the time to do each thing. Is it possible to read the first eight verses without the taint of divine predestiny?
Here’s another recurring theme in this philosophical retrospective on a wise man’s life: we are told six times that the really good things in life are eating, drinking, and enjoying your work and its fruits4. Rather than simply calling this shallow hedonism, we could reasonably interpret it – especially the “enjoying your work” bit – as promoting human flourishing. Humanist philosophers and religious skeptics such as Socrates and Paul Kurtz express similar sentiments, coining words like eudaimonia and eupraxsophy to express the idea. Combine this with what we learn from his repeated use of the word “ephemeral”, and it’s easy to think of Koheleth as an early existential humanist. Cool.5
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Unfortunately, a later editor felt that such religion-free morality was not appropriate for the Jewish scriptures, and added these two verses: “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone. For God will bring every deed into judgement, including every secret thing, whether good or evil.” (Ec 12:13-14)
Twelve chapters of telling us that there is no ultimate good, nothing lasts forever, and the greatest worldly good is human well-being, and then we get the old obedience mantra that we first met in the Garden of Eden, as if it is the natural conclusion to draw from what went before. This complete U-turn suggests to non-believers and believers alike that the God-fearing stuff was tacked on some time after Koheleth composed the main body of the book.
My recommendation: do as they do at Humanistic Texts. Lop off the unnecessary addendum, and take this as a good work of humanist philosophy, poetically-presented.
Song of Songs
Now, let’s see what we can make of Solomon’s other masterpiece, Song of Songs. Reading through from Ecclesiastes into the Song, you have to agree that either these two books were written by different people, or Deena was right that there was a severe shift in the author’s pharmaceutical habits between books.
In fact, the Song is probably no more Solomon’s work than Ecclesiastes was. As its Wikipedia page notes, “It was common practice in ancient times for an anonymous writer seeking recognition for his work to write eponymously in the name of someone more famous.”
What about the content? The Song is packed with a wide variety of romantic and erotic images. It is clearly an exchange between two lovers, with some comments thrown in by others. It is not always obvious who is speaking where, though the NIV and NJB translations try to suggest divisions, with headings like “Lover” for the man, “Beloved” for the woman, and “Friends” for other speakers.6
The man compares his lover to a mare; her eyes are doves; her lips taste like honey.7 She says his eyes, too, are like doves; he is like a gazelle or young stag. His skin is golden, his hair is dark and wavy, his legs are like marble.8 So far so good – modern poems and songs contain similar (sometimes identical) imagery.
But not all of the metaphors are so familiar, nor so complimentary to modern eyes.
Hair like a flock of goats”? From a distance, perhaps a big flock of goats flowing down a slope could evoke cascading hair. Teeth like a flock of shorn ewes”? From the context (“all of which bear twins, and not one among them is bereaved”), we must presume he’s telling us she has all her teeth, and maybe that they’re white. Fair enough if you’re living with bronze-age dentistry, but don’t try it in a Valentine’s Day card these days!9
I’m afraid I don’t know exotic fruit well enough to speculate about cheeks like pomegranates, and I’m completely lost when it comes to a neck like the tower of David with a thousand warriors’ shields hanging on it. Breasts like twin fawns may sound cosy and pleasant, though my knowledge of infant ungulates suggests they’re rather scrawny and leggy rather than round and bosom-like.10
With all that, you can’t blame the translators for trying in small ways to translate the imagery to contemporary romantic themes. The rose mentioned in 2:1
is a crocus in the original Hebrew.
There’s other imagery – gardens, locked gates, myrrh – but you get the idea. I’ve left the sexiest metaphors for you to find and enjoy on your own (or, preferably, with a companion).
We now have some idea what images the ancient Jews considered sensual or erotic. We can also infer that the author of this book found sex to be fun.
Which it is! Sex is a delight, physiologically and socially. Humans are adapted to wanting and enjoying sex. It is wired into us as a way of reinforcing pair bonding and maximizing our reproductive chances.
It is also at the root of what we value most: human life. The ancestors of every human on the planet (every animal of any kind, and most plants, for that matter) have been reproducing sexually for about 2.5 billion years. No sex would mean no life as we know it.
The author of the Song didn’t know just how long the history of sex is, but he almost certainly knew that sex leads to children. Even that, however, is not mentioned in the Song – and rightly so. When desire is upon us, it is not the consequences of sex that consume our minds, nor the historical precedents, nor its role in abstract moral philosophy.
It is the act itself. The raw, physical union of two people. This is what caresses the minds of lovers, what tempts and lures and pleases.
And this is what the Song is all about. It is about the fire that awakens in adolescence and, properly honoured and nurtured, doesn’t die until we do.
“Solomon’s” books
In Ecclesiastes we have a work of non-theistic moral philosophy, and in Song of Songs we have an erotic cavort through the poetic metaphors of a pastoral culture. The authors of both were big enough fans of Solomon, the wise king, that they credited their books to him. Both made it into the central canons of the Jewish and later the Christian scriptures. And both books, for the most part, convey secular humanist sentiments. What a pleasant reprieve to find, in a collection of bad science, repressive laws, and unlikely miracles, the odd book of humanist-friendly wisdom and joie de vivre.
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Footnotes
1From the commentary in print version of the New Jerusalem Bible – see also Wikipedia’s entry on Ecclesiastes.
2Ec 2:15, Ec 2:19, Ec 2:21, Ec 2:23, Ec 2:26, Ec 4:4, Ec 4:8, Ec 5:10, Ec 7:6
3Ec 1:2, Ec 3:19, Ec 11:8
4Ec 2:24, Ec 3:12-13, Ec 3:22, Ec 5:18, Ec 8:15, Ec 11:8
5This is leaving aside, of course, Koheleth’s brief lapses into nihilism (Ec 7:1-4) and misogyny (Ec 7:28).
6The feminist in me would love to rant about the linguistic sexism implicit in these translations that give the male the active label “Lover” and the woman the passive label “Beloved”, but I have too little space to make it more than a footnote.
7So 1:9; So 1:15, 4:1; So 4:11
8So 5:12; So 2:9, 2:17, 8:14; So 5:11, 14, 15; So 5:11; So 5:15
9So 4:1; So 4:2
10So 4:3; 4:4; 4:5
GENESIS (bookin’ through the bible 3)
The Book of Genesis is true from the first word to the last.
KEN HAM, CEO and president of Answers in Genesis
Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth,
more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand
years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.
SAM HARRIS, Letter to a Christian Nation
GENESIS
We’re pattern-seeking, cause-finding animals. It’s a very adaptive habit. The Book of Genesis represents early attempts, in the absence of reliable methods, to find patterns and seek causes — specifically why the world is the way it is, and why we are the way we are. They’re good questions, and they deserve the best answers we can muster. For a long time, this was it.
Though the NIV Study Bible continues to credit Moses with authorship of this book and the rest of the Pentateuch, most biblical scholars have concluded it is a composite of several sources originating between the 10th and 5th centuries BCE, including the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s fascinating as mythology. Only when it is taken as literal history, as science, or even worse, as a moral guide — long after better methods have been developed for all three — do I get incredibly cranky. Here’s my stream of consciousness on Genesis.
Gen 1
I’ve always found it intriguing that Genesis begins with two quite different creation stories — the so-called Priestly (1:1) and the Yahwist (2:4) versions. I’m unaware of any other culture’s creation story that allows you to choose between plotlines.
The highest overall value of the bible — obedience — shows up for the first time in the Tree of Knowledge story. That central value is still present in conservative Christian parenting research and advice, which regularly places obedience (to God, to parents) above all other virtues. And such a telling transgression was Eve’s! Humanity earned God’s wrath not through lust, or greed, or murder, but through curiosity—the desire to know. If desiring knowledge separated us from God, willful ignorance seems the path back to the garden. Is this a belief worth embracing, or even respecting?
Literal belief in the biblical creation story in the U.S.: 60 – 61%
Gen 6
It seems downright unsporting to go after Noah and the Flood – not even every species of beetle would have fit, etc etc. I am told, again and again, that I am fighting against a belief system long-ago vanished. No one believes in the literal Ark any more.
Literal belief in the Flood and Ark in the U.S.: 60%
Gen 12
Abram/Abraham lies repeatedly, claiming his wife is really his sister. Pharaoh, who could not have known he had been lied to, marries her and is punished by God for adultery. Abram/Abraham is richly rewarded by God. If Genesis is an allegory — a teaching story — what on Earth are we meant to learn?
Gen 16:10-15
I find this passage so charmingly human. ‘You were so laughing at me!” says Jehovah, a little hurt. The changing nature of God’s interactions with humanity is the thing that most energizes the bible as literature for me. I’m not aware of another myth system with the same morphing relationship. Correct me since I’m wrong.
Gen 18
I ADORE the negotiation here — Abraham haggling God down to ten. It’s a Promethean moment, really, an incredible act of courage, of testing God’s own moral definitions. What’s interesting is that negotiations stop at ten — and Sodom is destroyed after all, sparing only Lot, his wife, and his two daughters. So somewhere between four and ten righteous exceptions is the tipping point for destroying a wicked city. Mental note.
Gen 19
The incident of Lot offering his virgin daughters to the crowd for rape is one of the most jaw-dropping moral outrages in the entire book—despicable both for the act and for the clear message. Lot, remember, was chosen by God to survive the destruction of Sodom. Because he was good? No—because in offering his daughters for rape in lieu of the angels, he proved himself obedient. I hereby welcome other interpretations of the message of this scene, which also manages to include the first hints of biblical homophobia that continues to this day.
Then there’s Lot’s wife, turned to a condiment for the Eve-like crime of curiosity — or possibly even empathy for her dying friends and neighbors. No no, those were symptoms of the real disease. Once again, the crime was disobedience.
I won’t even touch the cave scene. But think of what it says about Genesis that I can skip a scene in which two daughters get their father drunk and have sex with him and still make a plenty sound case against the moral value of the book.
Gen 22
Lot holds the heavyweight title in the category of moral menace for a very short time. Within pages, Abraham steals the crown, proving there’s no crime he would not commit, no act too vile or unjustified, so long as God ordered him to commit it. That the founder of Judaism is the first on record to make use of the Nuremberg Defense is an irony too painful to contemplate.
Gen 32
Jacob wrestling with God is another passage I find incredibly intriguing. Does anyone know of parallels in other myth systems? Paging Joseph Campbell.
Obviously there’s more, but I’d better wrap—my word count limit approacheth.
My dismay over Genesis has nothing to do with the fact that it gets the science of life wrong. Nobody in the first millennium BCE got much of the science of life right. My horror is based on three things:
(1) That 46 percent of my fellow Americans think Genesis got the science of life right, and use that profound ignorance to block the acceptance of the single most humbling, inspiring, and transformative scientific discovery in human history — that we are related by descent to all other life on Earth;
(2) That Genesis praises absolute, unthinking obedience while condemning curiosity and intelligence; and
(3) That Genesis continues to fuel ignorant literalism, the corrosive notion of “original sin,” homophobia, misogyny, and any number of other human failings against which we just might make quicker progress without the unhelpful influence of a book that condones, even loudly encourages them.
Luke is lovely. Ecclesiastes is searingly powerful. Song of Songs is sexy. But Genesis, taken literally OR figuratively, is obscene garbage. Any book that includes it is a menace to basic human decency and to the enlightenment of the human mind.
That 49 percent of Americans believe the entire Bible is the inspired word of God is, to quote Harris, “a moral and intellectual emergency,” and Genesis itself provides all the evidence needed. I respect the people who hold these beliefs — all people are inherently worthy of respect as human beings — but saying I respect the beliefs themselves would render the word respect, a very important and useful word indeed, completely meaningless.
Okay, there’s my two cents. As I said, I do not pretend to be neutral, nor should I be. To be neutral on such a thing is to have given it no real thought whatsoever. So what’s your appropriately biased view?
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REMINDER: We’re pursuing an unusual study plan to shake things up and to interweave the favorite texts of skeptics and Christians. Next week:
Dec 10 — 1 Corinthians
Dec 17 — Mark
Dec 24 — Matthew and Luke
Dec 29 — John
Jan 8 — Exodus
Jan 15 — Leviticus
Jan 22 — Deuteronomy
Jan 29 — Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs
Feb 5 — Acts
Feb 12 — Revelation
36 days ’til Sex Day!
- September 26, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Science, sex
24
from Fraknoi, Voyages through the Universe, © Harcourt, Inc. 2000.
(That post title should do wonders with the search engines.)
Once in a while, a meme comes along that is so cool and worthwhile it simply HAS to catch fire — like “Chocolate Rain,” if it didn’t make me want to squish a puppy after three minutes.
Now Friendly Humanist Tim Mills in Edinburgh (no no, not “Eddinberg” — it’s pronounced “Eddinbudda.” Rhymes with “bread ‘n’ budda,” for no reason) Scotland has come up with the solution to the many humanist attempts to forge new, meaningful holidays — most of which, let’s face it, are weak and self-conscious, even if well-meaning.
First Tim posted this at the PBB Forums:
I’m currently in the thrall of Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar analogy – scaling the entire history so far of the universe into a single year.
It has occurred to me is that this is potentially a cool source for a few humanist holidays. The two biggies (to me) are Big Bang Day (January 1, 15 billion years ago) and the Arrival of Humans (December 31, from 10:30pm on – the last 2.5 million years).
Other good ones would be:
May 1: Milky Way May Day, formation of the Milky Way galaxy 10 billion years ago
September 9: Sun Day, formation of the Solar System 4.7 bya
September 25: Abiogenesis Day, origin of life 4bya
November 1: Sex Day, evolution of sexual reproduction, 2.5 byaAnd most of December, from the establishment of an oxygen atmosphere on the 1st (1.3bya) through the Cambrian Explosion on the 15th (~700mya) and then almost daily celebrations of new life (worms, trilobites, fish, land plants, land animals, insects, flying insects, …). We could have the coolest Advent calendars!
(If you aren’t familiar with Sagan’s Calendar, go here before reading any further.)
He elaborated in a recent blogpost:
A source of many potentially awesome holidays, at least in the final few months of the year, is the Cosmic Calendar, brainchild of the great Carl Sagan. In it, the entire 15-billion-year history of the cosmos as we know it is scaled into a single year, with the big bang at the start of January 1st and the present moment at the end of December 31st. Along the way you get events like the formation of the Milky Way galaxy (May 1), the Solar System (September 9), and the Earth (September 14), the origin of life (September 25), on up through our ancestors: eukaryotes (November 15), worms (December 16), fish (December 19), insects (December 21), dinosaurs (December 24), mammals (December 26), primates (December 29), hominids (December 30), and then down through the evening of December 31.
Tim’s idea hit me as brilliant, just as quickly as most such attempts hit me as lame. Pro-life Christians would quickly take over Life Day (Sept 25), of course — just like they took the solstice and the vernal equinox and turned them into…into… *Sigh.* It’s too fresh. I still can’t talk about it.
At least they’d keep their mitts off Sex Day!
The Cosmic Calendar is busy busy busy in December, so it’s the Advent calendar concept that I find particularly rich — celebrating the advent of complex life!
The advent calendars of my youth had little windows for each December day, behind which was a tiny toy or stale bit of chocolate. I picture a Cosmic Advent Calendar with gummy worms on December 16th, gummy fish on the 19th, Pop Rocks to represent the dinosaur-smacking asteroid on the 28th, chocolate monkeys on the 29th…and Flintstones vitamins on the 31st! Okay, help me out with that last one.
Imagine the educational potential in such a thing. I intend to mock one up for my family this year. Many thanks to the Friendly Humanist!
“To hell with this goddamn freethought parenting!”
- June 12, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, sex
- 20
To hell with this goddamn freethought parenting! — Rebekah McGowan
That shocking phrase came hurtling from between the tender lips of the mother of my children as we sat nursing our morning lattés yesterday.
Turns out Becca had spent the end of the previous evening fencing with our nearly 12-year-old son over the appropriate bedtime for a nearly 12-year-old son now that summer has arrived. She was proposing 10pm. He was pretty much proposing dealer’s choice, but willing to settle for midnight, maybe 11:30. With occasional extensions to dawn.
I descended into my latté foam. When I surfaced, she was still there.
“Well?”
I set down my mug and made a conscious decision to leave the little beige mustache where it was, figuring it lent me a certain gravitas. I could feel it fizzing, not unpleasantly. “And this has something to do with freethought parenting, I’m guessing.”
“Yes. He asked why. Why, why, why. Why do I have to go to bed earlier, he said.”
“Mm. And you said?”
“I said it’s not healthy to stay up late and sleep late. And he asked why not, if you’re getting the same amount of sleep? And I said I read that somewhere. It isn’t good for kids.”
Pfft. Where did you read that? I thought.
“And then he said, ‘Pfft. Where did you read that?'”
“No!”
“Yes! And I said it’s a known thing. And he said he wants to see it!”
The sweater-vested professor in me grinned. Before he gives full credit, my boy wants to see Mom’s citation page. Exterior Guy remained carefully grinless.
I paused, licking off the foam in case I needed the energy for my next move. “So it’s about what’s healthy? I mean, that’s the real reason you…I mean we …want him in bed at ten?”
“Yes! It’s not healthy for a kid to stay up until midnight every night!”
“Okay. So are you going to look it up and show him?”
“No! No, I am not.”
“No, of course not.” I explored the java reef a bit, surfaced again. “And, uh…why is that?”
“Because…well, for one thing, what if it turns out not to be true?”
Let me here confess the crashing unfairness of telling this story. In our marriage, the conversational shoe is almost ALWAYS on the other foot. For all my puffed up blathering about critical thinking and having confidence in reason, Becca’s usually the one talking parental sense into my head. So for me to take one of her rare lapses and sing about it in my blog is just outrageous. It’s just wrong.
Where was I.
Oh yeah: She said, “What if it turns out not to be true?”
“Well, if it’s not unhealthy, and that was your real concern, then you’d have nothing to worry about anymore. What a relief, eh?”
She sat in silence for a moment, then executed a twisting jackknife into her own mug. When she returned, she looked like I usually do in these discussions: moded and corroded. Plus a little fizzy mustache.
I did a strutting endzone dance (uh HUH uh HUH uh HUH). In my head, of course.
Turns out we both want him in bed with lights out at 10, and that neither of us really finds argument by proverb the least bit compelling. Becca has vaguely moralistic reasons — it just seems somehow wicked to stay up late and sleep in late. I agree, for some reason, though I tend to think that’s Cotton Mather speaking through us. As for me, I want sex more than twice a year (decidedly un-Matherish of me). And we both like to read in bed uninterruptedly. Plus it throws off the family rhythm to have one person waking at 11:15 am demanding breakfast. Those reasons are more than sufficient. So we agreed. And at that point, if there are no further witnesses, the gavel comes down.
And that’s the part that’s so often misunderstood when other parents hear that we want our kids to question authority, even our own. Questioning authority doesn’t mean they have permission to DISREGARD our decisions and our rules. It means they are invited to challenge our decisions, to ask for the reasons behind them, to try to change our minds — but at the end of the process, while they are children, we’re gonna win. And if they disregard a decision, there are consequences. Just like in life.
It isn’t a choice between anarchy and fascism. Giving our kids permission to know the (real) reasons behind our decisions and even to question those decisions (1) shows them respect; (2) helps them develop their own reasoning abilities; (3) keeps us honest by ensuring our reasons are indeed defensible; and (4) further defeats and diminishes the ability of later authorities to make them into compliant, unquestioning automatons, voting and spending and acting and thinking as they are told and waving the flags they are handed.
Sometimes there isn’t time to explain. Sometimes I don’t CARE to explain. Sometimes we say, “Because I said so.” The trick is to make these rare enough to actually sound funny to kid and parent alike when they happen, and to know when I do it that it’s an unshining moment in my parental career.
Once we’ve made a decision, our kids can file a minority opinion, or even appeal, if they come up with an even stronger proverb than Mom is using. Sometimes they change our minds. Happens quite a bit. But they know it only works if their reasoning is strong. Whining or raging is a quick ticket to a summary decision by the judge.
Like bedtime at 8.
The Relaxed Parent Film Festival
- May 28, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, sex
- 27
Our Friday night tradition started sometime last year. Every Friday we get a Papa Murphy’s pizza the size of a Buick and a family movie.
By family movie, I don’t mean “family movie.” I mean a movie that our whole family watches together, which believe you me is not often the same thing. And here’s where it gets interesting. It’s my job each week to choose the film. Here’s the audience:
MALE, 44, WRITER. Enjoys philosophical themes; unpredictable, non-linear narratives; line-crossing humor.
FEMALE, 41, EDUCATOR. Enjoys chick-flicks, ro-coms, foreign films. Has never seen a movie without crying.
MALE, 11. Enjoys science fiction, sports, fantasy, adventure. Hates everything he loved at ages nine and five.
FEMALE, 9. Enjoys character-driven dramas and comedies. Gets lost in non-linear narratives, requiring frequent paternal trips to the pause button.
FEMALE, 5. Enjoys an amazingly wide range of flicks, from Pokemon to war movies to comedies to space epics. Can’t read, so captions are out. Hides eyes whenever the music turns minor.
Okay now…find us a movie.
Wait wait, a few more things you should know. Neither of the parents will sit through anything numbingly stupid. Nothing that looks like That’s So Raven, and nothing of the Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh ouevre. If it’s animated, it pretty much has to be Pixar, which means actual plot and characters. And we’ve seen all of those, 4-20 times each.
As for parental concerns — well, our guidelines might strike some parents as reckless. I prefer the word relaxed. And that relaxation comes straight out of our worldview.
Conservative religious denominations often teach that humankind is inherently sinful — that beneath a thin veneer of civility lurks a boiling depravity, just itching to stretch its legs. We must erect all sorts of protections and precautions to avoid opening the floodgates, lest we crack each others’ heads open to feast on the goo inside, or worse, turn gay. “If not for the seventh commandment,” I once heard a Veneerist proclaim in a debate, “there would be NOTHING to keep me from walking out the door to cheat on my wife!” Nothing? Not love? I wondered. Or commitment? Or simple human decency? If you say so.
Most depressing of all was his wife, nodding like a bobblehead in the front row.
I don’t buy this for a minute. Though we humans do occasionally screw things up rather royally, most of the time most of us behave well, especially if we feel loved and supported by those around us. It’s yet another gift of evolution. Populations with a tendency toward self-destruction would quickly lose the selective advantage to cooperative ones. The outlook that my kids are evolutionarily inclined to be good changes almost EVERYTHING about my parenting, especially compared to those who see their kids as simmering pots of potential felony and monitoring the flames beneath them as the most urgent parental task. It allows me, among other things, to focus on drawing them out instead of beating them in.
I don’t have to psychotically protect my children from scratches to their protective layer. I want to immerse them in the colors and contrasts and confusions of the world — gradually, yes, but definitely. I believe this fearless approach is ending me up with some pretty remarkable, multifaceted, complex, wonderful kids. You should meet them. I think you’d agree. So, dinner on Thursday, then?
I once had a student, a college freshman, who had never seen a non-Disney movie. It was the standard her parents had developed to protect her from certain ideas, images, and themes — call them “colors” — that could have scratched her veneer, damaging the porcelain doll beneath, or worse yet, letting loose the she-wolf within.
As a result, she hadn’t seen The Wizard of Oz. She hadn’t seen E.T. Is there a Disney film that deals with the longing for home as beautifully as those two?
Since we began our movie tradition about forty Fridays ago, my kids have been exposed to a fantastic variety of themes and ideas, cultural touchpoints they refer to over and over. Yes, we’ve seen Flicka and Flipper, Over the Hedge, Little Manhattan and The Karate Kid. But then there are these:
Pleasantville • Edward Scissorhands • Cool Hand Luke • The Great Escape • Jesus Christ Superstar • Rain Man • Big Fish • Empire of the Sun • Life of Brian • Groundhog Day • Walking with Cavemen • South Pacific • Raising Arizona • Intimate Universe • The Truman Show • Walking with Dinosaurs • The Pursuit of Happyness • Stranger than Fiction • I, Robot • About a Boy • Brian’s Song • Parenthood • Bridge on the River Kwai
In addition to the Gs, they’ve seen a lot of PGs, plenty of PG-13s, and a few carefully-chosen Rs (like Rain Man). That means once in a while our kids hear a good solid swear or a reference to actual human sexuality, and have somehow avoided the plunge into foul-mouthed promiscuity.
I think this kind of low-key, normalized exposure makes it less likely they’ll gravitate toward these behaviors. If instead we hide these things, we make them powerful, attractive…forbidden fruit. When a Veneerist jumps for the remote at the first deep kiss or angry curse, he underlines the message that something truly magical is afoot.
Veneerist readers will naturally suppose that I’m advocating porn and slasher marathons for toddlers. Silly Veneerists. Non-Veneerists know there’s something between Little House on the Prairie and Debbie Does Dallas — a great big juicy wonderful and textured middle. My kids have been there, and they’re all the richer for it.
In less than a year, the five of us have explored the importance of honesty (About a Boy, Liar Liar), felt deep compassion and empathy (Brian’s Song, Pursuit of Happyness), learned to care deeply about those who are different (Rain Man, Edward Scissorhands), admired courage and perseverance (Empire of the Sun, The Great Escape), contemplated the meaning of humanness (I, Robot), challenged smiling conformity (Pleasantville, Life of Brian, Big Fish) and questioned our assumptions about reality itself (The Truman Show, Stranger than Fiction, Groundhog Day, Big Fish). We even stood with Judas as he took Jesus to task for neglecting the less fortunate as he pursued his own fame (Jesus Christ Superstar), traced our origins (Walking With Cavemen) and learned never, ever to build a bridge for the enemy, even if your craftsmanship makes you proud (Bridge on the River Kwai). Can’t tell you how many times that lesson has come in handy.
My kids have cried with empathy for people who initially scared them.
Most important of all, they’ve learned that a man really can eat fifty eggs.
Yes yes, fine, Charlie Babbitt [Tom Cruise] says “fuck” about a dozen times in Rain Man. He does so because he’s an arrogant, selfish jerk — and arrogant, selfish jerks don’t say “boogers” when they’re mad. My kids didn’t want to be like Charlie Babbitt, so why would they emulate his language? Instead, they marveled at how his selfishness slowly transformed into first tolerance, then selfless love for his brother — something underlined by his changing use of the full palette of the English language.
About the tenth time Charlie cussed, Erin shot me a look and said, “Boy, you can tell what kind of person he is.” She had a chance to handle it, process it, and put it in perspective in our living room rather than on the schoolbus.
Best of all, they’re developing a taste for the unique, the creative, and the offbeat, for imaginative narratives and complex visions of the world.
Sure, sometimes I cringe and leap to the remote when a scene heads a little further than we’d expected. But it’s worth the risk. So next time you’re thinking about a film for the whole family, reach beyond G and PG. Let them engage the messy, fascinating world out there while you’re in the living room with them. They can handle more than we give them credit for.
GREAT RESOURCE FOR PARENTS: Netflix’s Parent Advisory feature in the left margin of the page for each film. Click on the “more” link for a terrific, detailed run-down of elements to help you decide what’s appropriate for your kids. You might care more about profanity, while I like to avoid people with their insides on their outsides. The advisory feature gives us each what we need to know. Here’s an example of the parent advisory page for Big Fish, a family favorite of ours. And here’s the advisory that helped us to green-light the R-rated Rain Man.
Wondering and questioning, Part II
Meet my boy, Connor.
Connor is nearly twelve, wickedly smart and funny, endlessly creative and thoughtful and kind. I’ve had more outright conversational joy from Connor in the nine years since he started talking than from most of the rest of our species. Combined.
He wants to be an engineer. Sometimes he shares with me his plans for reversing global warming. Once he shared an idea for exceeding the speed of light—and I still can’t figure out why it wouldn’t work, at least in theory. Last week he sketched an ingenious idea for an inexhaustible light bulb. (I know why that one won’t work, but importantly, kept my pie-hole shut.) At the age of seven, he proposed a device that could identify which person in a packed elevator had farted. A panel in the floor would then light up under the perpetrator.
(We were alone in an elevator when he came up with that one, of course—and when the door opened and admitted an elderly lady, we vibrated with swallowed laughter, imagining the floor lighting up beneath her.)
But sometimes—much of the time—the topic is philosophical. Connor wonders about consciousness, death, ethics, time, and the idea of gods. One of his favorite riffs is to marvel at the fact that he was born at all, which brings us to one of the central differences, imho, between the religious and secular worldviews.
Let’s begin with a song, one that captures a large whack of my own worldview—so much, in fact, that it is one of our favorite lullabies:
It’s inherently humbling, that scientifically-informed worldview. Instead of being specially made in the image of the creator of the universe, given dominion over the world and all that’s in it, and having God’s only son take our form to come to Earth and die so we could live forever, it turns out we’re one transitory species among millions, an unimaginably small blink in time on an unimaginably small dot in space—trousered apes who will disappear into complete non-existence upon the death of our bodies.
But remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely was your birth. And it was this thread that my son and I riffed on the other day, picking up an inexhaustible thread.
It started with boxer shorts.
Connor needed boxer shorts immediately. I’ll spare you the reason, a familiar hash of peer pressure and arbitrary norms and middle school locker rooms. I ran him to the mall and we bought a few pairs. On the way home, I suddenly flashed on something from long ago. I turned and mentioned to Connor that he owed his existence to (among many other things) boxer shorts. What follows is, I submit, a definitively secular exchange of wonder.
Boxer shorts? This was news to the boy. Not the general idea of owing his existence to countless small happenstances, mind you. He has long enjoyed the knowledge that several hundred things could have prevented his parents from meeting, from finding each other attractive, from dating, from marrying, and from staying married long enough to spring off. He understands that one particular sperm and one particular egg had to meet for him to ever exist. And he vibrates with dawning excitement as he extends these had-tos back through the generations, back to his Confederate great-great-great grandfather who was felled by a Yankee bullet through the neck at nineteen and bled profusely—almost, but not quite, enough to erase the great-great-great grandson he would one day have. Connor has worked his way back through a million generations of humans and prehumans to imagine two ratlike creatures rocking the casbah at the precise moment the asteroid slammed into Chicxulub 65 million years ago, further clinching the existence of their great-great-great etc grandson. (Oooh, baby, one rat says to the other. Did you feel that too?)
But boxer shorts—that was a new one. He demanded to know what I was talking about.
We’ve already done the sex talk (went very well, thank you). So now I told him that the sperm can get sluggish if they are too warm, that briefs hold the testicles against a man’s warm body, and that four months after his mom and I started trying to create him, without luck, I saw this article that suggested switching to boxer shorts, and boom…
His eyes were wide. “You got pregnant.”
“Well Mom did, technically, but I…”
He clutched his head. “Oh my GOSH! What the freakin’ heck!” (His current favorite pseudo-swear.) He seemed to get it. He turned toward me with an electric look, the look of a person who just missed getting hit by a train. “What if you saw that article a month EARLIER?”
Oh yeah, he gets it. “Or later.” We’d added another casual causal coincidence to the march of time—his father stumbling over some random magazine article…at GreatClips, I think it was, while I waited for a haircut…
“WHAT IF SHE FINISHED THE OTHER HAIRCUT BEFORE YOU SAW THE…?”
Boy does he get it.
I have several religious friends who think that God fixes these things for us. He put the mag there, you see, and kept the haircut going until I could read it. We each have one ideal mate, and God works things out so we meet, fall in love, have the children we’re supposed to have when we’re supposed to have them. Setting aside the revolting idea that God wanted an abused woman to marry her abuser, etc etc, we still end up with a world that makes me yawn, a world with a good measure of the wonder stripped out. In that world, we are Jehovah’s chesspieces, moving in preordained patterns, how exceptionally tedious. Tedious in a holy way, I mean.
Meditating instead on how amazingly unlikely was your birth—well, if you haven’t done it, please be my guest. It’s hard to take existence quite so much for granted once you realize how very, very, very close you came to missing the dance entirely.
